abandoned barn and model T - VirginiaQuestion:
Why do you use found objects to create your artwork? And where do you get your materials from?
Most people can understand relationships with other people, or relationships with pets. We create affinities for certain things in our lives, like cars or favorite restaurants. We allow these things to tell stories about us because of our relationship to them. As for me, I have always been made of dirt and rusty nails, have always collected the broken bottles and general store screen doors hinges, so I guess its only natural that when I make a piece of art, the finished product, the finished story, is a direct result of the ingredients.
Why do you use found objects to create your artwork? And where do you get your materials from?
Answer:
I have always had a fascination with objects. Like most kids, I wanted to touch and feel everything. A lot of rusty nails and handfuls of dirt ended up either in my mouth or in my pocket, so my mother tells me. Growing up, I had free reign to search and collect with my brother and sister. There were outbuildings, weathered barns on their last leg, piles of rusted tractors and old Plymouth station wagons, creeks full of quartz crystals and freshwater clamshells. Every inch of our property had some intriguing pile of archaeological relics, or at least, I viewed them as such. I was interested in every object, I think mostly because I wanted to know what it was and where it came from. I was also interested in the lives of the people who lived in our house before us. My parents always talked about the various stages our home went though: first a post-revolutionary dance parlor (c.1796) , then a farm (c. 1820), then a civil war hospital (c.1860’s), and back to a farm (c.1900’s), which was in the abandoned state when my father found it and started to fix it up. The old timers in the area talked about how their great-grandfathers remembered seeing the house after it was hit by a cannonball. So strange and wonderful to hear the tales as a child, and to create my own mysteries as to what was really lying beneath the soil all the time. I was always curious, and to satisfy my curiosity I would collect and examine. My brother and I had a secret (well,...almost) place in the loft of the corncrib where we had set up wooden chairs and milk cans for stools, and we would dump out our backpacks full of stuff collected during the day: rusted door hinges, porcelain cups from the sinkhole in the meadow, broken arrowheads, civil war musket balls dug from the garden, leather straps and bent horseshoes from the farrier’s shop that had long since fallen down, and so many broken blue glass medicine bottles. At one time we conducted our own archaeological dig, sifting soil, bagging each specimen, and documenting each artifact. That was short lived, however, because after three hours of digging in that particular area, we had expected to uncover a little more than the hundred rusted nails we found.
When I began creating art, I had the desire to create something with all of my found objects, but something that showed the objects in a different light. I wanted to create something that was more than a relic, something that highlighted the life of a particular object, but also transcended the mundane and everyday aspect of that object. I started making mixed media pieces, using ordinary things like twine and hubcaps, but gradually moved on to use more personal objects, like coat buttons and corn cobs. I decided to use wood instead of canvas as a backdrop. Canvas was a foreign material to me, but I had always had a relationship with wood: Rotten pieces of wood floating in the creek, thick chunks of wood in the barn’s rafters, small splinters of wood under my fingernails, chopped logs of wood we used for our wood stove. I wanted to create something that was a part of my life, so I used things that I knew personally. Part of my desire has always been to collect materials from places that have personality. Most of my recent constructions use barn wood from barns I have explored or discovered on a back road.
I have always had a fascination with objects. Like most kids, I wanted to touch and feel everything. A lot of rusty nails and handfuls of dirt ended up either in my mouth or in my pocket, so my mother tells me. Growing up, I had free reign to search and collect with my brother and sister. There were outbuildings, weathered barns on their last leg, piles of rusted tractors and old Plymouth station wagons, creeks full of quartz crystals and freshwater clamshells. Every inch of our property had some intriguing pile of archaeological relics, or at least, I viewed them as such. I was interested in every object, I think mostly because I wanted to know what it was and where it came from. I was also interested in the lives of the people who lived in our house before us. My parents always talked about the various stages our home went though: first a post-revolutionary dance parlor (c.1796) , then a farm (c. 1820), then a civil war hospital (c.1860’s), and back to a farm (c.1900’s), which was in the abandoned state when my father found it and started to fix it up. The old timers in the area talked about how their great-grandfathers remembered seeing the house after it was hit by a cannonball. So strange and wonderful to hear the tales as a child, and to create my own mysteries as to what was really lying beneath the soil all the time. I was always curious, and to satisfy my curiosity I would collect and examine. My brother and I had a secret (well,...almost) place in the loft of the corncrib where we had set up wooden chairs and milk cans for stools, and we would dump out our backpacks full of stuff collected during the day: rusted door hinges, porcelain cups from the sinkhole in the meadow, broken arrowheads, civil war musket balls dug from the garden, leather straps and bent horseshoes from the farrier’s shop that had long since fallen down, and so many broken blue glass medicine bottles. At one time we conducted our own archaeological dig, sifting soil, bagging each specimen, and documenting each artifact. That was short lived, however, because after three hours of digging in that particular area, we had expected to uncover a little more than the hundred rusted nails we found.
When I began creating art, I had the desire to create something with all of my found objects, but something that showed the objects in a different light. I wanted to create something that was more than a relic, something that highlighted the life of a particular object, but also transcended the mundane and everyday aspect of that object. I started making mixed media pieces, using ordinary things like twine and hubcaps, but gradually moved on to use more personal objects, like coat buttons and corn cobs. I decided to use wood instead of canvas as a backdrop. Canvas was a foreign material to me, but I had always had a relationship with wood: Rotten pieces of wood floating in the creek, thick chunks of wood in the barn’s rafters, small splinters of wood under my fingernails, chopped logs of wood we used for our wood stove. I wanted to create something that was a part of my life, so I used things that I knew personally. Part of my desire has always been to collect materials from places that have personality. Most of my recent constructions use barn wood from barns I have explored or discovered on a back road.
Most people can understand relationships with other people, or relationships with pets. We create affinities for certain things in our lives, like cars or favorite restaurants. We allow these things to tell stories about us because of our relationship to them. As for me, I have always been made of dirt and rusty nails, have always collected the broken bottles and general store screen doors hinges, so I guess its only natural that when I make a piece of art, the finished product, the finished story, is a direct result of the ingredients.
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